Take Down This Book

When you are old, take down this book of Yeats
And throw it in the garbage. Hart Crane, too.
Take Browning, book and ring, the motley crew
Of Symbolistes, Sam Beckett and his mates,
The Sitwells on their grand Sheffield estates,
John Donne, Ann Donne, and flush them down the loo.
Take Eliot and Ezra Pound with you
When Shakespeare sighs and the balloon inflates.

When you were young, contemporary verse
Was all you wanted, something shiny, bright,
Original, and stark, shining a light
In corners of the dusty room. You'd curse,
Intending disrespect. Now here's the hearse,
And all the old ones gather. It's a blight.

A Winter Sonnet

It's one more season; we can see it through
If we're as careful as we ought to be,
Respecting every breath — some we can see
As we traipse through the cold world, turning blue,
And some invisible, granting no clue
To our existence. Will you think of me
When dreaming of the stars, uncertainly?
Myself, I promise I will think of you.

Time passes, but we will think ourselves young,
Wild, unaffected by the winds that blow
Or years that pass, or facts we ought to know.
The stars shine carelessly where they were hung,
And when you taste those snowflakes on your tongue
You may remember childhood. I hope so.

Revealed

Then all at once my genius is revealed,
A tattered bit of uninspiring fluff
That makes a desperate king cry, "Hold, enough!"
And registers as blood, brown and congealed.
My juvenile record has now been sealed,
So hardly anyone knows just how tough
My friends were, reckoning on threats and bluff
To strive, to seek, to find stuff in the field.

I yield the floor to my admiring foes:
They wonder how I've eaten all the socks
(They're made of chocolate), overcome the shocks
That flesh is heir to, and de-thorned the rose.
The answer (almost everybody knows)
Is that they fear me and my woolly flocks.